raleighnet.org

Cool. Movable Type has released a tool to allow for threadable trackbacks. See an example here. Get more info here. I’ve been waiting for something like this. Of course I don’t understand the documentation yet. I’ll need to take some time and figure it all out, but this is clearly one of the most interesting directions for this tool to go.

Starvos is wondering whether the addition of Trackback to MeFi is going to provide some critical mass (link). I think it might. I also think that when they release a tool to thread discussions over blogs trackback’s utility will become clearer and use will dramatically escalate. Until then, it’s mostly just an automated referral log kind of thing. I don’t have much else to say about this, but since my first two external trackback attempts have failed, I want to see if third time’s the charm, or if it’s a problem with my own settings. Do you see me looking at you WonderChicken?

TrackBack doesn’t seem to work quite as I thought it did, and I’m wondering is the functionality there and hidden, or is it not possible to do what I was hoping it would do?

TrackBack seems to work great for automatically updating your site with people who refer to one of your entries. That’s useful I suppose, but I thought that the way it would (could?) work is more of a threading of ideas layed over blog space.

That is each person’s TrackBack link would show all entries that are talking about a subject, and organize them in a hierarchy so that you’d get something like:

Original Post
…TrackBack Level 1
…….Trackback Level 2 *You Are Here*
…….TrackBack Level 2
…TrackBack Level 1

I haven’t explored the technology at all, so maybe it’s still possible to do something like that. I hope so because that is far more interesting to me than the uses I’ve seen so far.